Vanilla Cupcakes

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas, if you were celebrating, and otherwise I hope you had a lovely weekend. I’m on vacation with my family in Florida; 9 of us staying in a 3 bedroom house. The good news is there are plenty of people to feed, and seemingly endless requests for baked goods!

My father only likes vanilla cake with chocolate frosting (apparently) so, in addition to some mint chip brownies (subbed 2/3 cup mint chips and 1/3 cup semisweet chips in this recipe), I decided to make some vanilla cupcakes. Mom then told me her favorite was vanilla with vanilla frosting, so we decided to do the frosting half and half.

In a house with 9 people, and even more coming to dinner, we opted for 2 dozen cupcakes. The recipe below makes 24, but can easily be halved if you don’t need as many. I adapted this recipe from Babble, and since their cinnamon roll cookies have been one of my biggest hits to date, I knew these simple vanilla cupcakes would be a fan favorite as well. All you have to do is top them with your favorite frostings – we used vanilla and chocolate buttercream – then decorate and serve.

VANILLA CUPCAKES – makes 24

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1.5 cups sugar

4 large eggs, room temp

2+3/4 cups AP flour

2+1/4 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp salt

1 cup milk

1 tsp vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350ºF and line 24 muffin tins with papers.

In a small bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. Also, combine your milk and vanilla.

Cream together your sugar and butter in the bowl of a mixer until light and fluffy. Then add your eggs one at a time and mix well before adding the next.

Then, using the dry-wet-dry method, add your flour in three parts alternating with the milk and vanilla. Be careful not to over-mix!

Fill your muffin tins a little over halfway full – you should have 24 sizable cupcakes.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until they’re a nice golden color. Use a cake tester to make sure they’re done, but feel free to leave them in a little extra, if they need it, so they reach an appetizing color. (The picture below isn’t quite an appetizing color but the lighting was weird. They really didn’t come out electric yellow, I promise :))

Let them cool completely before frosting with your favorite flavor. I used the recipes below:

VANILLA BUTTERCREAM

1 cup butter

2.5 cups powdered sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

2-4 Tbsp heavy cream, as needed

CHOCOLATE BUTTERCREAM

1 cup butter

2.5 cups powdered sugar

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1 tsp vanilla

2-4 Tbsp heavy cream, as needed

If you don’t have pastry bags, just use a ziplock bag with a corner cut off to pipe frosting. Make sure it’s a thick bag- I squeezed too hard on my first one and it essploded 😉 Once your cupcakes are frosted, enlist the help of your cousins to decorate.

Look how much care they took to hand place all the sprinkles. (Unfortunately, they really had to for the vanilla frosting because I didn’t make it creamy enough and nothing was sticking!)

Then, sit back and admire your hard work.

And then it’s time to clean up! Or, you know, eat some leftover sprinkles 🙂

These were a lot of fun to make, and better to eat. People have been having them for snacks, and even for breakfast, for the past 2 days. I hope you enjoy making these, whether by yourself or with your very own helper elves.